Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
wrote. “The root cause of most problems,” another claimed. “This seems
to me a basic issue which must be solved or all will be lost!”
40
Only slightly behind population on the list of international priorities
were concerns over what the Sierra Club called the global commons—
those areas shared by many nations but technically owned by none, con-
sisting mostly, in the Sierra Club's view, of ocean environments. Members
worried that the pollution and degradation of the oceans and the loss of
marine environments— along with air pollution and environmental degra-
dation in Antarctica— might affect human and natural systems on a variety
of scales. They encouraged the Sierra Club to defend these environments
on the international stage.
41
In a 1976 survey of local-level Sierra Club offi-
cers, well over half of the respondents identified global commons issues as
their primary international concerns, beating out geographically specific
problems like deforestation and even nuclear proliferation. After popula-
tion, concerns about the health of the oceans and air dominated the Sierra
Club's International Program in the late 1970s, and so it would have made
sense for the organization to become involved in the mounting national
and international discussions about climate change.
But that did not happen. Few of the organization's chapter officials advo-
cated a wholesale commitment to the international arena for any cause, let
alone one as nebulous and uncertain as climate change. Roughly 20 per-
cent of Sierra Club members polled in 1976 recommended that the orga-
nization commit 10 percent or more of its overall budget to international
issues, but almost an equal percentage thought the club should reduce its
international budget to less than 3 percent of the total, and just shy of a
third hoped to keep international activities to less than 5 percent of the
budget.
42
Though scientists and members of Congress became interested
in the CO
2
problem early in the decade, the issue of climate change had
not sufficiently piqued club members' concern in 1977 for the International
Program to include climate as a major part of its next five-year plan. Nearly
a third of the 1976 survey's respondents identified global commons issues
as their top priority for the International Program, but the subheading “air
pollution and climatological studies” drew no votes as a top priority, and
less than a third of respondents identified climate as a priority at all.
43
As
late as 1979, the year of the World Meteorological Organization's World
Climate Conference, discussions of the climate and climatic change within
the Sierra Club remained brief, tentative, and noncommittal.
